


Pause

by LaVieEnRose



Series: The One Where Justin Loses His Hearing [84]
Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Angst, Epilepsy, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Seizures, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 12:12:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16702333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaVieEnRose/pseuds/LaVieEnRose
Summary: Something is very wrong.





	Pause

**Author's Note:**

> I warned ya.

Well, let's fucking get into it then.

In the fall of 2013, Justin caught three colds over a six week period.

I minimized, rationalized, contextualized. He's got that shitty immune system, and he was traveling a lot and eating like shit and stressed about a show right after another and spending a lot of time with a six-month-old germ factory. Of course he was getting sick. And I was busy at work with the merger shit, and everything sort of ran together anyway, so it's not like I was keeping an exact count of how many days Justin spent curled up sniffling with a cup of tea. The kind of shit he has to deal with, we have to deal with, and I'm expected to get bent out of shape out of a few fucking colds?

Three. In a six week period. 

That ain't normal, kids. Not even for Justin. And when cold number four—four in seven weeks—cropped up about two days after he'd turned the corner with his last one, it got to the point where even I couldn't feign ignorance, and we all know I minored in that in college. 

Justin touched the base of his throat while he poked at his sinuses in the bathroom mirror. “I think it was that fucking guy at the gallery waving that gross fucking handkerchief around,” he said. “Some fucking germ biome experiment in the making.”

I stood behind him and chewed on my thumbnail. **You have a fever?**

“No, I don't think so. God, this is fucking ridiculous. I can't even remember the last time I could breathe through my fucking nose.” He sneezed and groaned in a way that sounded hoarse, painful. “Speaking of. It begins.”

I sat by the sink and watched him blow his nose. His shirt was off, and I was trying to figure out if he'd lost weight. 

“You want a shower?” he asked me. “I just took one a few hours ago, but the steam might be nice.” He sneezed and pawed at his nose. “Our neighbors are going to start complaining you're keeping a biohazard in the building.”

**What do you weigh now?**

**Rude. I don't know.** He turned the shower on. **You coming?**

**Yeah, in a minute.**

He stripped out of his jeans and got into the shower. I watched him go foggy through the glass, like some kind of mirage. Something that could just disappear.

I cleared my throat and waved for his attention. **Hey, sneezy?**

**Yeah?**

**When were you tested last?**

He tilted his head back into the spray. “Uh...September?” 

**You think maybe it's time to do that again?** I said, as casually as anyone's ever fucking said this shit. I could feel my heartbeat up in my ears. 

He stayed still for a long moment, rinsing his hair, and then he gave this congested little sigh and looked at me.

“It hadn't even fucking occurred to me,” he said. “How pathetic is that?” 

I shrugged a little. **Took me a while too. It's better to know.**

**You think I have it.**

**You keep getting sick, Sunshine. I don't know what to think.**

He turned off the shower, wrapped himself up in a towel, and came and sat next to me on the counter. I tugged him into my side, even though he got my clothes wet. He sneezed hard and I ran my hand up and down his back.

 **I'll call the doctor tomorrow, okay?** I said. **He'll fit us in, he loves you.**

**You should get tested too.**

**Yeah, I'm due anyway. My last one was June or something.**

Justin played with my fingers. **Maybe you'll have it and I don't. That would be funny.**

 **Yeah, I prefer irony over health.** Irony's a fun sign. 

**See, you think you're being sarcastic, but that's why this relationship works.**

I smiled a little and kissed his forehead. **Don't call it a relationship, that's disgusting.**

“I feel like I'm supposed to be freaking out and crying or something,” he said.

I shrugged. **Whatever you want's fine.**

He swung his legs. **I want to take a shower.**

**Then come on.**

I fucked him in the shower and again once we went to bed, and he took his meds and rubbed lotion down his legs. I watched the way his muscles stretched. He had lost weight, I think.

 **Are you going to be mad at me?** he asked. **If I do have it?**

I lay there and watched him. **I think a little, yeah.**

He nodded. 

**But not for long.**

**Yeah, I know.** He put the lotion down. **Will you be mad at Evan?**

**I'd like to think no.**

He laughed, just a little. **Me too.**

**Come here.**

He lay back on the pillows and I rested my head on his chest and listened to his heart flutter. I ran a hand up his side, trying to slow it down.

 **What are we going to do?** he asked. **If I'm positive.**

**Figure out a medication you can take. I'll start on PrEP and we'll see if you react from me taking it. We'll figure it out.**

**You're making it sound like it's no big deal.**

**No, I'm making it sound like it's a chronic illness and we might have some experience managing chronic illnesses.**

**Can we cut the bullshit just for five seconds?**

I lifted my head up and kissed his nose. **No.**

**You're going to keep acting like it would be fine if I had it up until I have it?**

**Yeah.**

**Right, and then what? Then you fall apart and drink every liquor store in midtown and I leave you out of guilt and run off with some band of orphans and start a circus.**

**What's your act?**

**Handstands.**

**You are stretchy.** I lowered my cheek back to his chest. **Breathing sounds okay.**

“I'm sorry, Brian,” he whispered.

 **Shh, don't talk.** I said, and I stayed awake for a long time after he fell asleep, feeling his warm skin underneath me, listening to his heartbeat. _Here here here here._

I woke up to him screaming.

 **Whoa, whoa, hey, hey.** I switched on the light. **Jesus, take it easy.**

He sat up, panting.

I took a few seconds to catch my breath. Christ, who needs a gym membership when you have a partner who will graciously scream you out of a deep sleep a couple times a month. I sat next to him and gave him a minute to calm himself down, brushing his sweaty hair away from his face and giving his shoulder a quick squeeze.

 **Better now?** I asked after a while.

 **Yeah.** He groaned a little and sunk his head into his hands. “Fuck.”

 **I know,** I said, even though he wasn't looking at me.

**

So between the lack of sleep and the nightmare and the worry that my boyfriend might have yet another incurable, life-altering disease, I was maybe a little cranky at work the next day. Our GP agreed to see us that afternoon, so I was going to cut out early and meet Justin there. I'd tried to get him to come to work with me, but no luck. He'd said he wanted to get some studio time in. You'd have thought he was fucking dying tomorrow.

Christ.

Evan came in at one point with some papers from the art department. **Need you to sign off on this. They want a new one of those smart boards down there.**

I beckoned him over. **And they send you to do their bidding?**

**I don't think anyone else even comes upstairs anymore. I think they live there like mole people.**

I looked over the forms. **Yeah, this is fine.** I signed at the bottom and glanced at him as I handed it back. **How are you?**

**Uh, fine. Why?**

There was no way I was having him self-flagellate about it before I even knew if there was anything to have feelings about. God knows I had enough on my plate managing Justin's guilt spirals. **I can't ask about the well-being of my...whatever you are?**

**Okay, can I ask about yours? Because you look like shit.**

**No you may not.**

He rolled his eyes. **Good talk, Brian.**

**Yeah. You need anything?**

**Just a new smart board,** he said, collecting the papers from me, the medical bracelet with my phone number dangling off his wrist. 

He looked good. Healthy.

 **Okay,** I said. **Good.**

**

You might expect that Justin and I had some sort of soul-bearing heart to heart in the doctor's office while we waited twenty minutes for our test results, but having an interpreter sitting in the room with you really kills your chances to have a deep personal conversation. Thank God. 

Justin's cold had progressed stupidly quickly over the course of the day, and he sat on the exam table and sniffled while I crossed my legs in a chair next to the interpreter. **What'd you get done today?** I asked him.

He sneezed. **I'm doing that zoo thing.** This abstract piece. Lots of texture.

**Get a lot done?**

**Some. I slept a lot.** He sighed a little. **Can't stay awake lately.**

**Yeah, I know.**

He scratched a couple of hives on his wrist—he always gets a few at doctor's offices, just from the fucking residue of a hundred medications he's allergic to, and the greatest fucking irony in the world is that Justin Taylor isn't safe in hospitals, and oh boy will we get to that—and said, **You want to get sushi on the way home?**

**That's like three times this week.**

**I don't feel like cooking.**

**I didn't say you have to cook, just fucking something besides sushi.**

**Maybe if you didn't order the same thing every time you wouldn't get sick of it.**

**I know what I like.**

**Variety is the spice of life, Brian.**

**Oh, don't I know it. Why, just last week at Nova—**

He kicked me and shot a pointed look at the interpreter, but she was just sitting there reading her book.

 **You care too much what straight people think,** I said. Fucking obvious statement of the century.

**I just don't want to confuse her. If she thinks I'm the slutty one she's going to mix up which one of us is positive.**

**Don't talk like that,** I said, and he sighed and put his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, so at least we didn't have to talk anymore.

I squeezed his ankle when the door opened and our doctor came in. He sat down in his wheely chair and glided his way over to us and said, “Okay, so.”

Justin reached for my hand. I let him.

“Negative,” he said. “Neither of you has HIV.”

Justin breathed out and sunk his head into his hands and generally looked about as relieved as the doctor didn't. 

**Something else is wrong,** I said.

The doctor nodded.

I tugged Justin's sleeve. **Something else is wrong.**

Justin straightened up. **With me or with Brian?** It's always weird hearing an interpreter speak for him, hearing her phrase stuff a little bit differently than I know Justin means. Like here, she said, “With me or with him?” even though I knew Justin would have used my name there, would have wanted the doctor to know the fucking...seriousness with which he takes me, God, I don't know, the fucking importance this kid places on me and whether I'm okay. It's not like it matters; I mean, I'm barely making sense. It's just a thing.

 **With you,** I signed, small, because I knew. The doctor wasn't looking at me.

He said, “Justin, I want you to get in to see your neurologist right away.”

 **How right away?** Justin said.

“Tonight.”

**

So I did warn you about this before, but I suppose I've kept the full story in suspense long enough, so here's what we found out at seven PM, sitting in an exam room at the hospital where we'd met Justin's neurologist. 

In an uncommon but _really_ not as fucking rare as it should be side effect, Justin's anticonvulsant was destroying his bone marrow. His white blood cell and platelet counts were what his neurologist kindly described as _catastrophic._

“Honestly, it's a miracle you've only been catching colds,” she said. She was wearing a mask. So were the nurse and the interpreter.

And then there was Justin and me, sitting there like a fucking science experiment, his hand attached to my thigh. 

“Right now, you're vulnerable to anything and everything, and you're not able to fight infections off the way you should,” the doctor said. “This isn't the sort of immuncompromise that you're used to. This is...this is very serious.” 

Justin mostly just looked pissed. And stuffed-up.

I handed him a wad of tissues from my pocket and said, **So what are you going to do about it?**

“We need to pull your anticonvulsant immediately,” she said. “There's no way around it.” 

**We're not even going to taper it down?** Justin said. Even when he was in the fucking hospital with pancreatitis, we tapered it.

She shook her head, and I ran my hand over my mouth and stood up and paced around a little. Justin watched me.

“Justin, you're headed rapidly for a complication called aplastic anemia,” she said. “We can reverse it now, but you continue taking it you'll get to the point where your only treatment option is a bone marrow transplant. We can't risk that.”

 **Look at the interpreter,** I said to him.

Justin watched her give the whole spiel, then said, **Okay, so...what happens? I'm just not taking anything?**

 **We'll start working you up on a new one right away,** she said. **We'll build you up on a new dose of that as quickly as we safely can.**

 **What the fuck are you talking about, safely?** I said. **This last one nearly fucking killed him, you're about to have him on _nothing,_ and you think you have some kind of grounds to talk to us about _safely?_**

 **What the fuck good is that doing?** Justin said to me.

**Shut up, Sunshine.**

**Sit down,** he said, firmly enough that I did. Justin wasn't feeling anything right then. Justin was on autopilot, and...look, if you've seen the way this kid can panic, it would scar eyou too to see him shut down. 

**You're not going home,** I said, and then I turned to his doctor. **We're admitting him, right? We're knocking him out so he doesn't have to be awake for the fucking plethora of seizures coming his way?** I fingerspelled 'plethora' to make sure there was no goddamn mistaking the kind of hell she was sending Justin into. 

**I don't want to be admitted,** Justin said.

 **I don't want to hear it,** I said, and he folded his arms and pulled his legs up on his seat.

But his doctor said, “Ordinarily, yes, that's what we would do.”

 **The fuck do you mean, ordinarily?** I said.

She sighed. “The hospital is the worst place you can be if you have a compromised immune system,” she said. “I don't like even having him in the building for this. If we decide to admit him, he'll need to be in complete isolation, and even then it's no guarantee he won't pick up an infection he won't be able to fight off.”

 **Isolation,** I said.

So just to be super clear about this, we're talking about Justin alone in some insulated box in his least favorite place in the world where he can't understand the language, surrounded by medications that can kill him in a minute or less, either heavily sedated or fucked out of his mind from seizures. Just so you've got the whole fucking picture here. 

“I don't want that,” Justin said softly, and how he wasn't just screaming continues to be fucking beyond me.

The doctor nodded.

 **Without me,** I said. **Would he get an interpreter?**

“We couldn't have any extra personnel in—”

Unbelievable. I thought I fucking liked her. **It's not extra.**

“I know,” she said.

**So he'd be in a room by himself not understanding anything that was going on, unconscious for most of it, without me there, and we, what, trust someone not to give him shit he's allergic to and pray to whoever the fuck we can think of that despite all that he doesn't _still_ catch something?**

“Yes,” she said. “If we admit him.”

Justin looked at me and shook his head, his eyes as round as quarters.

 **No,** I said. **No, we're going home.**

**

And so we settled in for a quarantine. Dr. A said we'd try to get Justin up to a therapeutic dose of his new anticonvulsant in ten days, and then we could bring him in and get his blood redrawn and find out if he had, you know. A fucking immune system.

I went to the office and got all the files I'd need for a nice long horrendous vacation because fuck if he was getting left alone and fuck if I was bringing him to the office for everyone to cough on. He ordered groceries and FaceTimed with the baby and got some kind of makeshift second opinion from Daphne, who told him if he set so much as a toe outside the apartment before his white count was up she'd kill him herself to save some time.

 **They all want to bring shit,** he said, sprawled out on the couch. **Food. Medicine. Whatever we need.**

**No.**

“I know,” he said softly. “It's just...it's weird. I feel fine. I just feel like I have a cold.”

**Well, twelve hours from now you're going to feel like hell, so at least that'll be cleared up.**

**I should have made you go to the studio and get my painting.**

I sat down beside him on the couch. **You're not going to be up to painting. You know that.**

He leaned back, squirming his legs into my lap. “Jesus, it's like standing there waiting for a truck to hit you. This is so fucked.”

He was correct. This was totally and completely fucked. 

**Are you scared?** I asked him.

“Yeah.”

I ran my hand up and down his leg. I couldn't bring myself to muster up some kind of reassurance, because Jesus, what was there even to say? We could be careful, and God knows we knew what we were doing with seizures at this point, but there was still risk, and he was still going to feel like absolute hell.

And right now he was sitting here with his fucking feet on my lap and the doctors had told us all this fucking horrible shit, but he was sitting here and his feet were on my lap and he was _fine._

I can't goddamn explain what was being asked of us here. That he had to just sit here and wait for his body to start to revolt. 

It is fucking unnatural, the things the world has asked Justin to do. 

I cleared my throat and shook his head. **Where do you want to be? We should make a base.**

“On the floor here is fine,” he said softly. “I don't want to just stay in bed.” Of course he didn't. He didn't feel sick, and everyone kept telling him he was sick. This all felt like some awful fucking joke to _me,_ and I wasn't the fucking punchline.

 **You should eat something,** I said. No fucking sushi, that was for sure. Nothing we hadn't goddamn sanitized.

**Yeah, in a little while.**

So first we set up a nest for him on the floor, and God, there is nothing more fucking depressing than preparing for a seizure, there just isn't. It's normally something we have to rush, because Justin gets a minute, maybe two of warning typically before one of his big ones, and that's rough enough, him being at least partially capable of helping ready his body to be goddamn fucking ravaged, but this was worse. It reminded me of his sad fucking mansion in LA where he'd put out all these safety measures because there wasn't anybody around to keep an eye on him. He went and changed into one of my old v-necks, nothing with a crew neck that could choke him or straps that could strangle him, and I lay out the floor cushions and moved the furniture back and tried not to think about why I was doing it, that there was a bottle of pills sitting on his nightstand that would make him not have seizures and the reason he couldn't take them still seemed so completely fucking abstract. At that point. 

I hugged him and felt him shiver. **Fever's up, I think,** I said.

**Yeah, maybe I'd have seizures anyway. God, I'm gonna piss myself, aren't I?**

**Oh, yeah, I'd put money on that.**

**Great.** He took a shaky breath. **When do you think it's going to start?**

**I don't know. Maybe like five AM?**

**You should try to get some sleep before then.**

I held up my hand. **I'm telling you right now, we're not going to do this.**

He knit his brow.

**This worrying about Brian because this is so fucking hard on him thing, we're not doing this. You have no fucking immune system and your brain's about to explode, we're not going to fret about me not getting a full eight hours. I just...that's just too fucking irritating, I'm not going to entertain that. Just...come on, please? I'm saying please, here, can we skip the poor poor caregiver stuff? We have enough on our plate without the martyr Olympics.**

He considered this. **Okay, but you have to promise to like break your finger or something when this is over so I get something to do.**

**You can break my nose again if you want.**

**Yeah, okay.** He shuddered and sat down. **Fuck.**

**All right?**

**Just scared.**

**Put a movie on,** I said. **I'm going to warm up something to eat, okay?**

He made some noise of vague agreement, and I went to the kitchen but paused on the way and just looked at him, and you have to understand here, the way he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, how goddamn scared he looked...I _had_ to give him something in that moment, you understand? It was fucking imperative that I give him something.

I stamped on the floor until he looked at me, his eyes that kind of big and sad that makes you think you're looking at someone who knows exactly how fucking unfair the world is, who has seen all the goddamn ugly there is out there. And you didn't save him.

It was imperative, that's what I'm telling you, for me to say something to him.

 **You know I can handle this, right?** I said.

He still looked scared, but he nodded.

I smiled in a way I hope to God was reassuring. **I've got this. I know what to do.**

He nodded again, a little more confident, and I forced myself to walk slowly to the kitchen where I crouched down on the floor and leaned against the refrigerator and just breathed for a minute, in and out through my nose, listening to the clock in the living room count down seconds until he'd be in hell. 

And then I got up and made him dinner.

**

So we waited out our time. I loaded him up on painkillers and some muscle relaxers to try to take the edge off all this shit, and he took his fucking comically tiny dose of the new anticonvulsant and didn't have an allergic reaction, so at least goddamn something went okay. We ate on the floor and then put some music on and danced for a while and then realized we should probably have sex because God knows when we'd next get a chance to, but he got upset because I wouldn't kiss him on the mouth 'cause I was fucking scared to death of giving his non-functional immune system something else to fight with, and even though he knew that some part of him kind of thought it was because he had a cold, and I don't know, it hurt his feelings or something. Leave him alone, he was having a rough fucking night, he got to kind of be a little bitch right now. 

We put a movie in and lay on the floor and dozed on and off. I was maybe eighty percent awake when Justin said, “I think it's starting.”

I sat up, stretching. **How do you feel?**

“Uh, the colors are too bright.” He took a deep breath and let it out, eyes closed. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

I didn't want to lay him on his side until I knew if he was going to lose consciousness; it was just gonna upset him if this was a small seizure and I went and acted like it was something major. And sure enough, it was a small one, more or less. His leg shook like it was being electrocuted and he said his vision was fuzzy, but it wasn't anything awful. **All done?** I asked him when he stilled, and he nodded and sipped some water.

“I'm going to be fucked for signing soon,” he said.

**I know.**

He lay down on his back. “Head's starting to hurt.”

**Your head always hurts.**

“Oh yeah,” he said softly. His voice was so hoarse.

 **I think you are sick after all,** I said, brushing his bangs off his forehead.

“Yeah. I feel it now.”

**

It wasn't until around seven in the morning that we really hit trouble. Justin's hand had been clenched up for hours and he'd had a few absence seizures which he doesn't even notice unless someone tells him and I didn't feel any real need to alert him to. I was on the couch answering a few work emails while he watched some boring as fuck TED talk muted on the TV, which usually means he's trying to sleep. I knew he was bored as hell, but he just doesn't have a lot of options when he can't use his hands. His cold was bothering him too, because it's not like he was getting any real fucking rest, and the way his doctor had talked about his immune system I kept expecting to blink and all of a sudden he'd have ebola or something, but really he was just lying there sneezing a lot and shivering as his fever dipped and rose. Honestly it was a familiar kind of soundtrack while I worked, and I was letting him just hang out in the background of my consciousness until with no warning he was making noises like he was choking.

This is why we keep him on the ground.

I got him on his side and stayed behind him—I might be an expert at these things, but I really prefer not to look at him during, given the choice—and held him still and counted seconds while his body shook. The whole thing was short, under a minute, and he took a rattling breath in and turned over onto his back, looking up at me.

 **Hi there,** I said.

“Hey,” he whispered.

 **Wasn't too violent,** I said. **I think you're okay.**

“Don't feel good,” he whispered, and I swallowed.

**Yeah, your body's not giving you a lot of help with that cold.**

“I'm tired now,” he said.

**You want to get in bed for a little while?**

Even that fucked up, he knew it wasn't a little while. He knew this was giving up.

“Yeah,” he whispered, and I nodded shortly and picked him up.

**

Time kind of stopped mattering after that. Measuring in hours slipped away in favor of measuring seconds, minutes, for seizures. Day and night were less important than when Justin was awake and when he wasn't. When he was seizing and when he wasn't. I set alarms to make sure he was taking his new anticonvulsant the goddamn moment he was due for each dose, and I kept feeding him painkillers and muscle relaxants because fucking look at him, but besides that...everything felt really, really unimportant. Our friends kept texting me asking me how he was and I couldn't bring myself to reply with anything more than the bare minimum. I hadn't even bothered to tell anyone in Pittsburgh. Jenn was gonna fucking kill me.

It just...everything that wasn't in the room with me right then felt fucking fake, and there was nothing in the room but me, Justin, epilepsy, his fucking unbattled cold, and walls that felt like they were getting closer and closer by the second.

It was hard to believe this was ever going to feel like home again and not a hospital. Our room filled up with every medical supply we have: his nebulizer, the humidifier, the blood pressure cuff, thermometers, tissues. I washed my hands so many times my skin started to crack. One minute I was thinking about sealing the doors and windows, like we have to sometimes when his allergies are really bad, and the next I was fucking absconding out to the balcony to gulp down fresh air like I was drowning, trying to pretend I couldn't hear him asking me if he could come outside, just for a second, just for a _second._

Seconds didn't mean anything unless they were in seizures. I told him no, over and over. No, you can't come outside. No, you can't go to the bathroom by yourself. No, you can't get up. No, you can't have cough medicine. No, you can't draw. 

Fucking promising him every other minute I wouldn't make him go to the hospital. Like I was going to put him in a fucking cab right now, or have some goddamn paramedics put their hands all over him. He'd catch bubonic plague before we even made it through the front doors, fuck. 

I was holding onto the railing on the balcony and remembered that I could breathe when I heard him call me from the bedroom. He was sitting up in bed, shivering and holding himself. His sinuses were starting to swell.

 **Hey,** I said. **What do you need?**

“Can I take a shower? I feel so fucking gross, I want a shower. I feel okay right now.”

He needed a win right then.

 **Yeah,** I said. **Yeah, okay. Come on.**

He couldn't really walk on his own at that point; his brain had either given up on sending signals to the right side of his body or else was sending so goddamn many that they were cancelling each other out, who knows. Honestly the physical symptoms of seizures, the pain and the headaches and the exhaustion, are fucking awful, don't get me wrong, but the worst part is what the fucking unnatural amount of activity going on in his brain and how completely that neurologically fucks him up. He's tried to explain it to me, but I think it's probably impossible to understand unless you've lived it, and I wouldn't wish this on goddamn anyone. I wouldn't even wish it on me, and let's not get into what a mindfuck that is in and of itself. 

It's basically his brain just fucking screaming, that's the best way he's been able to describe it. 

I got him to the bathroom and helped him sit on the bath mat while I ran the shower. He painstakingly undressed himself, and I let him, as rare as it is under any circumstance for me to let him take his clothes off himself, because I knew right now he needed to do something on his own. I leaned against the shower enclosure and crossed my arms, watching him, and chuckled a little when he got stuck in the neck of his t-shirt and signed **Help** dramatically above his head. I crouched down and pulled it off him, and he smiled at me.

**All good, Sunshine?**

He wrinkled his nose.

**No? Raincloud?**

“Thunderstorm,” he said, his voice small and painful, while he stretched his arms up above his head. 

**I like thunderstorms. Here we go.**

I helped him up and into the shower and washed his hair and let him drag soap over me. He made a grab for my cock, but I stopped him and said, **Your hand's going to spasm and you'll squeeze it off.**

“The risk is part of it.”

 **Yeah, gonna disagree with you there. At least you didn't try to blow me.**

He gnashed his teeth and I shuddered, and he laughed a little. 

I kept a hand under his elbow to help him stay up, but it was clear this wasn't going to work longterm. His legs were shaking, and he was so goddamn tired. I watched his white-knuckle grip on the door handle.

**You want to sit?**

He shook his head. He was getting frustrated.

 **Okay...how about this, come here.** I lifted him up by his thighs and he came willingly, wrapping his arms around my neck. Normally I'd get at least a hand free to sign and trust him to hold himself up—he can cling like a damn chimp—but, well. These were not normal circumstances. “Okay?” I asked him. He watched my lips and nodded. 

I backed us under the shower spray and he tilted his head back and closed his eyes and breathed, and when he started sucking water off my neck I nudged his chin up with mine and kissed him, hard and long, holding him up against the shower wall, his legs tight around my waist with every bit of strength he had left. 

Not to take this too goddamn far, but that's how I see Justin, when I close my eyes. Sick as hell, squeezing the hell out of me, giving me every single bit of himself that he has.

Not to take this too goddamn far. But that's how I'll remember him.

Of course it got worse from there.

**

We actually had a few hours mostly off, where Justin's hand shook most of the time and his whole arm more than occasionally, but nothing more violent than that, and I actually thought maybe the new meds were starting to kick in. I got him to eat some of that gross brown rice he likes, we got a few hours of sleep, and I thought maybe, maybe, we were nearing the end of this shit which is...almost hilarious, in retrospect.

I woke up at one point to the bed shaking. He was conscious but clearly not real happy about that, his warms wrapped around his head, and both his legs were going pretty haywire. I tugged him gently into me and let him hide his face in my neck until it was over. 

He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Was hoping not to wake you.”

I kissed his forehead. **You're a moron.**

“Yeah.” He drew in a ragged breath. “Since you're up, can you help me to the bathroom?” It hurt him to say it. It's so fucked up. Justin would never, ever think less of anyone else for asking for help, but...well. You've been on this journey a long time. You know the deal. 

So I helped him up as casually as I could and once we were there took my hands off him and washed my hands for the eight hundredth time and brushed my teeth and poked at my pores in the mirror so he wouldn't feel like he was being hovered over while he peed. **Did you break out when you were a teenager?** I asked him.

“You knew me when I was a teenager.”

**Before that.**

He came over and washed his hands, dragging his right leg a little. “Sometimes.” 

**I didn't, and Claire told me that meant I was going to get wrinkles earlier. I think she was right.**

“Claire was right about something?”

**You know what they say about broken clocks.**

He sneezed and looked at his reflection. “Christ, I look like death.” He did look pretty fucking awful. His eyes had this glaze over them and there was a dull layer of sweat on his skin. “Look at my sinuses.”

**Yeah. Brave of you to try out a new look when you're this sick.**

He snorted, and I grinned. “You know how I live to inspire,” he said. He gripped the counter and breathed out slowly.

I watched him warily and waited for him to open his eyes. **You okay? Let's not have a seizure in the bathroom, please. Floor's pretty hard.**

“We should go now,” he said, his voice flat. He wasn't even scared anymore. He was just so fucking tired.

I wrapped my arm around his waist and started to bring him back to the bedroom, but he stopped me after a step. “Floor. Floor now.”

“Shit,” I said. I started lowering him to the ground, but he was unconscious and seizing just about immediately. “Shit shit shit,” I mumbled, catching him under the shoulder blades, and I managed to get him onto the floor with his head pillowed safely on my lap. I watched his limbs hit the floor and tried not to imagine the bruises he was giving himself. “Easy, easy,” I said, rubbing a circle on his back. “Finish this up and we'll go back to bed.” His leg jerked violently, and I said, “Shh, easy, come on. Give it a rest.” 

It kept going, one minute, two, two and a half. “Shit.” He made this horrible miserable noise, and I said, “Justin, c'mon, you're okay.” I kept counting seconds in my head, watching his fucking lips turn purple and wondering what the goddamn shit I was going to do if this didn't stop, but finally, finally, it ended. It took another fucking harrowing five seconds before he started breathing, but he did eventually, pulling in air like he'd been drowning. “Okay.” I bent down and buried my face in his hair. “Okay, Sunshine.”

“Brian?”

I moved him onto his back, looking up at me. **Hey. That was bad, how are you?**

“I'm sorry.”

**Stop.**

“What's wrong, Brian?”

Jesus. **Nothing, everything's okay.**

“I think I'm cold.”

**We're going to go back to bed. I just need to get out from under you first, so I need to sit you up, okay?**

“Sure,” he said vaguely, but as soon as I moved him off of me he groaned and turned and vomited on the bathroom floor. Damn. I really should have seen that one coming. 

“Ah, shit,” I said, while he stammered out apologies. **Justin, it's fine, Christ, relax.** I got him situated against the shower enclosure, dropped a towel over the mess to deal with in a minute, and ran a washcloth under some cold water. **Better?** I asked him, while I cleaned off his face and helped him sip some water.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, goddamn it, _shit._ ”

**You're fine.**

“I don't know what's going on,” he said, and God, the fucking honesty in his face.

 **You don't need to know.** I pushed his hair back. **I've got it.**

“I just threw up on the floor.”

**You sure did, yeah.**

“What the fuck?” His eyes were shining. “Brian, what the fuck? I'm so sorry.”

 **It's _okay._** I kissed his forehead. **Try to calm down, okay?**

He laughed with just no fucking joy. “What the fuck is going on?”

**You had a seizure.**

“I don't think so.”

**Okay...trust me on this one. I'm going to pick you up, all right?**

He shook his head and winced. “Too big.”

God, he is so fucking weird after seizures. **Let's check,** I said, and he nodded and let me pull him up. I kept a hand around his head and lay him slowly on the bed, cognizant of the way he winced as his joints moved. **Okay.** I pulled the covers over him and held the thermometer up. **Open.**

He did, and I felt down his body while I waited for the beep, checking him for injuries. He watched me and clearly had no fucking idea what I was doing, but he let me move him around. 

**Okay, I think you're good,** I said. I pulled the thermometer out at the beep. A little under a hundred and one. **Hey, that's not bad. All right.**

“Brian, I want to go to sleep.”

 **Get to it,** I told him, and he was out right away. I breathed out and ran my hands down my face and thought about all the places I could be that were not full of vomit and illness and misery, Palm Springs and Miami and Bermuda and Aspen and fucking Bangkok and anywhere that was not my fucking hospital room of an apartment. Thought about the sun beating down, a drink in my hand, Justin beautiful in white.

Justin was there, in the fantasies. That's what I'm trying to get across, you fucking vultures.

So, you know. I shook my head at myself and came back to reality and went to clean up the bathroom, and was just throwing towels in the laundry basket when I heard Justin start seizing again, not ten minutes after his last one had ended.

“No, no, no, are you fucking kidding me?” I rushed back to the bedroom and pulled the covers off him before he could suffocate himself and grabbed him before he fell off the bed. “Shit shit shit _shit._ How much fucking more of this is he supposed...Justin, come on. Come on.”

It lasted for three fucking minutes. 

And I almost threw in the towel and called an ambulance right then and let them take him away and put him in isolation. And knowing how the rest of this story played out, I think that if I had done that he would have died a few days later.

So thank God for being fucking paralyzed with fear, I guess.

He gasped in those choked breaths when he was done and shivered so hard that for a second I thought he was still seizing, and I stayed on my knees next to the bed and went, **Hey, hey, hey,** waiting for him to look at me, but he turned and buried his face in the pillow instead and just started sobbing. And I'm not talking the usual crying he does after seizure when his brain's just so fucking confused that it can't cope. This was just fucking wrenching, painful crying, like I hadn't seen from him in years, like I maybe hadn't ever seen from him at all. 

You have never seen someone that wrung out. You don't know what that does to a person.

And neither do I, not really, but I got up onto the bed and held him and said, “I know, Sunshine, I know,” anyway, I said that goddamn lie over and over while he cried so hard I thought he'd forget to breathe again. 

He hit the mattress with his fist and cried and was just so goddamn fucking overwhelmed and I swear to God in that moment I would have done anything. I would have fucking done anything in the world to make him stop.

I covered his body with mine and kissed the exposed skin on the back of his neck, but nothing I did made any fucking difference. This wasn't rational crying. He didn't have any fucking rationality left in him. 

He was just being fucking goddamn tortured by his own brain, and everyone has a breaking point. Even him.

He fell asleep eventually, as suddenly as he had before, and I got out from under him, went out to the balcony and thought about bats coming towards my boy and other things that I could not stop and I crumpled at the waist and screamed as loud as I could until I ran out of air, and people who weren't Justin yelled at me to shut up. 

I think that was somewhere around day four.

**

“Brian?” 

I startled awake and tried to get my bearings. Apparently I'd come to the kitchen to get some coffee and just fucking fallen asleep with my head on the counter. I grimaced and slapped my cheeks on the way to the bedroom. **Hey. What's wrong?** He'd been okay when I last saw him, curled up with one of his mystery novels. I think. It was all blending together.

He was sitting up in bed now, looking exhausted. 

**Did I miss one?** I said.

“Yeah.”

**Sorry. I fell asleep standing up.**

He laughed a little. “Sounds right.”

**You okay?**

“I think my shoulder popped out.”

I raised an eyebrow. **Yeah, I don't think so. I know what this one feels like. You'd know if your shoulder popped out.**

“Okaaaay,” he said. “In that case, I _know_ my shoulder popped out.”

I sighed. **Okay, let me see.**

“Be careful, it hurts.”

I sat down behind him on the bed and felt around his shoulder. I stopped, then compared it to the other, then went back to the first.

“I mentioned it hurts, right? How long are you going to poke at it?”

I came around where he could see me. **Your shoulder's out.**

“I know.”

**You dislocated your fucking shoulder and you're acting like you have a paper cut.**

“Can you put it back in? I tried to do it myself but I couldn't get the angle right.”

**You tried to...okay, no, I'm going to get you some ice and we'll figure out how to fucking splint this thing until we can get you to a hospital.**

“I am not sitting around with a dislocated shoulder for a fucking week, just put it back in. It'll stop hurting as soon as you do it.”

**It absolutely will not stop hurting as soon as I do it. I was taking Vicodin for a week.**

“Yeah, well, you really like Vicodin. It'll feel better, at least.” He looked at me with those fucking puppy eyes. “Please? It hurts.”

**Jesus. I don't even know what I'm fucking doing. Hold still.**

It wasn't that hard, actually. I held him by the neck with one hand and the arm by the other and winced at the cracking noise when his shoulder fit back into place. 

“Fuck,” Justin said. “God, that's so much better.” He rotated his arm in a slow circle. “Thank you.”

**Let me get you some ice.**

“Okay. Thanks.”

Christ, as if he didn't have enough to deal with. I filled a bag with ice and brought it back to him. **At least for once I fucking know what you're going through, right?**

He smiled. “Thanks. It really feels okay now.”

**You don't have to do some macho shit.**

“I'm not,” he said.

I studied him. **When this happened to me I was in fucking agony.**

He shrugged—with that fucking shoulder. “I'm not trying to ride a bike.”

**Justin.**

“What do you want me to say? Maybe it was only a little bit out or something, I don't know. It's just not that bad.”

**I want you to tell me that you're not in so much goddamn pain all the time that you barely fucking notice your shoulder dislocating.**

“I noticed it.”

**Justin.**

He sighed and looked away from me.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered, and I held the ice against his back.

**

Time kept drifting by, and the new anticonvulsant kind of started working, and I had a vague hope that a day would come when I would not be scared out of my mind. I fucked him carefully one night and we lay next to each other afterwards while he coughed and we looked at the ceiling.

 **I miss the baby,** he said.

**I know.**

**Do you think I have an immune system yet?**

**I don't know. Maybe.**

He didn't.

**

We took a shower where I didn't have to hold him. He made himself a sandwich. We had sex. I caught up on the work I'd missed—still from home, we were still prisoners in our hermetically sealed apartment, but it was something. We FaceTimed with the baby. We watched a movie in the living room. He went ten hours without a major seizure. Things were looking up.

Except his fever didn't break, and one night, the goddamn night before we were going to go to the doctor's office and get his blood tested to see if he could brave the outside world again, he woke me up shaking my arm. I reached out to him automatically but it took me a minute to find him; he was sitting up, and his thin t-shirt was soaked through with sweat. 

And he sounded like he was breathing through a wet sponge.

“Oh fuck,” I whispered.


End file.
